A game of cat and mouse

At 225 meters long and five stories high, the former cruise ship, docked in the new port of Patras, in northern Greece, is a sight to behold. The ship dominates the entire port with its imposing body. Between ten and fifteen trucks are stationed outside. The drivers eagerly wait to board the Cruise Europa. Dozens of migrants can be seen observing the scene at a distance, eager to spot an opportunity to board the ship. Ticketed passengers and their vehicles will board much later.

Patras, a seaside medium-sized city, is situated in the northwestern part of the Peloponnese peninsula in Greece. The port was relocated out of town some years ago in order to decongest the city center from the massive trucks moving in and out of the port on a daily basis. For Vangelis, a thick-waisted employee of the Patras Port Authority, there was an urgent need to put an end to the chaotic scenes caused by migrants making a run for the trucks heading to Italy: “You cannot imagine the situation before. It was chaos: tourists, cars, trucks, and migrants all together. And the coast guard chasing them with cars and dogs. It was bad for the city and bad for tourism. And it was also dangerous for them [the migrants] too. We had many accidents and injuries.”

The port of Patras is the main gateway of Greece to Europe. Due to the political upheaval and instability in the Balkans throughout the 1990s and the multiple land border crossings, Patras became the main route for both tourist and commercial transport in the region. Because the landscape around the new port is bare – the port is a vast surface of uninterrupted tarmac – there is nowhere to hide. This means that migrants making a run for the trucks are immediately in direct sight of the police.

The AVEX building, a disused wood-processing factory in the port area, is currently the makeshift home to some 380 migrants, mostly from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Maghreb. They sleep rough or in tents in the factory’s derelict warehouse spaces that provide some protection from the winter’s biting cold and the summer’s scorching sun. They learn about this place mostly through their networks and through smugglers, as it is from there that they try every day to sneak into the trucks that are heading to Italy, and from there to other European destinations.

As one enters the port, one can spot migrants trying to climb the fence that separates the rest of the port from the departure gates, which is where all the trucks park waiting to board the ship. The steel fence is some two meters high and is reinforced with barbed wire on top, quite ramshackle in places from where people have climbed it.

This is an ordinary scene in the port, one that repeats three to four times every single day. Migrants show the scars and tears of these failed attempts on their bodies and clothes (see Jusionyte 2018 for discussion of migrant injury). They carry nothing with them except small bottles of water tied with thick rope around their waists or on their backs.

Attempts by migrants to board the trucks are not made in isolation. After someone gives a signal, groups of up to fifty young people make a run for the trucks. They then scale the fence, land on the other side and sprint towards the trucks. Numbers play a critical role in this endeavor: the more people participating, the better the chances that some will make it.

Truck drivers are also involved. Once the migrants come anywhere near the trucks, the drivers alert the coast guard by honking their horns. Patrolling coast guards in cars race in from the other side of the port, sending migrants scattering in all directions. Migrants hope to avoid being run over by the speeding cars or bitten by the police dogs. Usually, when migrants are apprehended, the police keep them for several hours and then let them go again.

There is a strange familiarity between the migrants and the police. They seem to know each other. As night falls and all the trucks have boarded the Cruise Europa, the police approach the fence and announce the end of the game: “Finished for today. Tomorrow we do it again. Who’s injured? Let’s go to hospital.”

The age of undocumented migration

International migration has risen in significance on the agendas of wealthy countries. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the number of international migrants reached 258 million in 2017, an increase from 220 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000 (IOM 2019). And, while undocumented migrants comprise only a small proportion of a country’s immigrants, unauthorized migration dominates most discussions and perceptions of immigration (Jones-Correa and de Graauw 2013).

In response to the rise in global migration and its heightened visibility, many western nations have installed and aggressively fortified immigration controls on an unprecedented scale to deter migration and to punish immigrants. These measures constrain everyday choices as well as life trajectories for migrants. They also sow fear and anxiety in communities across the globe. At the same time, migrants residing in these countries form families, establish community connections, participate in local economies and governments, and pursue love, happiness, meaning, and political participation, just like their citizen neighbors.

Scholarship on undocumented migration often accords primacy to the nation-state in producing illegality, due to its power to define its relationship to citizens and noncitizens and to mobilize an enforcement apparatus to police the boundaries of membership. In many respects, we agree with this depiction. However, in this book we expand the analytical focus to include the interplay between different national and supranational configurations of “illegality.” We argue that, while the production and experience of “illegality” are strongly shaped and determined by the state and state-based rules and regulations, they are more broadly framed by processes involving multiple states and international agencies and increasingly nested in multiple scales of governance. Furthermore, they are stratified by gender, class, and race.

This book explores state efforts to illegalize some forms of human mobility and the response of immigrants, their families, and their political and social allies to increasingly intrusive, repressive, and punitive measures of immigration control. In doing so, we draw a wide circle around undocumented migration to capture the international foundations and dimensions of “illegality.” Through an examination of empirical examples in the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Kingdom, as well as current scholarship, we trace how immigration policies and practices inform, influence, and impact decisions to migrate, the nature and length of migration journeys, and the experiences and opportunities of migrants in diverse host-country settings. At the same time, dynamics and political developments in receiving countries further complicate experiences of migration and settlement. To that end, we illustrate how migrants’ everyday experiences are shaped by a range of laws and policies, from those explicitly targeting immigration and settlement of noncitizens to others that regulate access to public services, or regulate labor market more generally, but that nonetheless shape the possibilities and opportunities available to an individual with precarious immigration status.

From the journeys that migrants take to the lives they lead on arrival and beyond, this book aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the global, yet also local, phenomenon of undocumented migration. As such, we offer a triptych portrait of contemporary undocumented migration, which links: (1) the macro-societal processes that produce undocumented migration; (2) the shifting governance of immigration across different national borders and various locales; and (3) individuals’ everyday experiences residing in host countries as undocumented migrants. This book primarily features the experiences of immigrants in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. As such, our examination does not, for example, capture the dynamics of migration between countries in the global South – like migrants leaving Myanmar for Thailand or Venezuelans fleeing political unrest and poverty for nearby Colombia – and of other wealthier countries like Canada or Japan. However, we draw on some of the major themes in the academic literature and in the popular discourse on immigration. Indeed, undocumented migration is now a global phenomenon. As the effects of armed conflict, environmental disasters and injustices, climate change, and economic inequality render large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, migrants seek refuge in countries of traditional settlement and those that have not been seen as long-standing immigrant destinations. This book is our effort to bring together a diverse set of issues and understandings about contemporary migration.

Our approach is driven by our interest in capturing the plurality of scales at which “illegality” is produced and experienced. In service to these goals, we have developed the concept of illegality assemblage. This is a term we use to describe the loose and dynamic system of laws and practices that transcend national borders and in which different interests and agendas find some kind of accommodation. We think of “illegality” as the product of a multi-scale and multi-actor assemblage that produces various configurations of rights, entitlements, constraints, and challenges in places in which migrants’ lives unfold – thereby affecting every aspect of their lives as individuals and in families and communities.

About the book

We began the book with an ethnographic description of a modern-day game of “cat and mouse” to emphasize the diversity of structures, processes, and actors involved in migration projects across multiple state boundaries. Furthermore, this vignette illustrates our methodological and geographic foci. As ethnographers and qualitative researchers, more generally, our work examines the everyday experiences of migrants living in liminal, precarious, and clandestine statuses in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Much of our work has also focused on young people of various non-legal statuses. Thus the empirical and theoretical material framing this book is reflective of our particular vantage points as scholars. Through this perspective, we aim to shed light on undocumented migration as a global and transnational process. We focus on how multiple nation-states contend with this phenomenon while also examining how the everyday experiences of individual migrants are shaped by illegality. By zooming in and out of global, national, local, and individual contexts, we animate the multiple dimensions that produce, reproduce, and contest illegality.

This book has been written during a period of incredible turmoil in our respective countries. On September 5, 2017, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an administrative action by the Obama administration to protect young undocumented migrants from deportation. The move followed similar actions to end protections for immigrants holding Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from six countries. The repeals of DACA and TPS were central to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign promises to dramatically curtail immigration to the United States. Taken together, these actions directly impact more than one million immigrants living in the United States.

Trump’s election and the ascent of populism in the United States came on the heels of an equally dramatic chain of events across the Atlantic Ocean. Following the Arab Spring uprising and civil unrest in North Africa and the Middle East between 2011 and 2018, more than two million people crossed the Mediterranean to Europe by boat without authorization. Over 17,000 deaths were recorded among people trying to cross the sea, and many more unrecorded deaths are thought to have occurred along land routes. In 2015 alone, at the height of Europe’s so-called migrant/refugee crisis, more than one million arrivals were recorded in Italy and Greece, and 3,771 people died while crossing.

Lack of preparation in response to sea arrivals contributed to widespread moral panic among Europeans and the emergence of anti-immigration political movements in several EU member states.

In the United Kingdom, fears of a migrant invasion played a major role in the referendum that saw 52 percent of British voters cast their vote to leave the European Union after more than forty years of membership. Overnight, three million non-British EU citizens were forced to grapple with a change that would dramatically reshape their futures. The European citizenship that had provided them the freedom to live and work in any of the EU member states since the early 1990s, albeit without the right to vote in national elections and referenda, was set to dissolve, casting their legal status and their lives in the United Kingdom into uncertainty. Similarly, about one million British citizens living in other EU member states saw their life and work prospects change dramatically.

A brief note on terminology: in this book, we mainly use the terms undocumented and unauthorized to refer to those migrants residing in destination countries without legal status. However, when referring to particular terms from the literature or from the media and, when trying to make a more specific point, we also employ terms such as clandestine, precarious, and irregular. We use the term migrant to denote those who are on the move or are settled outside of their country of birth, irrespective of their motivations for doing so, their goals, or their countries of origin. We nonetheless employ appropriate terms to denote people’s different immigration statuses when necessary (e.g., asylum seeker, refugee, DACA beneficiary). Without conflating or ignoring the categorical and experiential differences between various groups of migrants (undocumented migrants, migrants with resident and work permits, refugees, asylum seekers), we wish in this way to highlight the permeability of the boundaries between different statuses. We acknowledge that language use as it pertains to the study of “illegality” is dynamic and often reflects the ever-changing nature of immigration laws, policies, and practices across different nation-states.

Outline of the book

This book highlights the dilemmas of undocumented migrants who find themselves on the wrong side of geopolitically and socially drawn lines, the vast majority of whom live in fear and uncertainty, attempting to forge lives for themselves and their families despite their undocumented status. As such, most undocumented migrants exist at the margins of society, fighting for their dignity with fortitude. Our aim is to delve into the concept of undocumented migration and the experiences of undocumented migrants by drawing upon and connecting theoretical insights and ethnographic and empirical data. We start by developing our theoretical framework on undocumented migration as a global and transnational phenomenon. In chapter 1, we introduce undocumented migration as an elusive social phenomenon that crosses national borders and increasingly attracts the attention of the international community. We consider who counts as an undocumented migrant, how one becomes undocumented, and why some forms of human mobility are categorized as “illegal.” We discuss how this conceptually and empirically slippery category of mobility makes counting and measuring this group difficult. While the state’s rules and regulations determine what counts as undocumented migration and who is to be considered an undocumented migrant, we also argue in this chapter that the production of “illegality” exceeds the borders of the state and also involves processes at the local, regional, and global levels that ultimately shape the concrete experiences of undocumented migrants. In chapter 2, we offer a theoretical framework for the study of undocumented migration and understanding the experiences of undocumented migrants. The chapter considers the impact of precarious legal status on migrants’ identity and sense of belonging. Chapter 3 considers the international, national, and local dimensions and their interplay. State borders operate as a sorting and filtering mechanism for human mobility, in which “illegal travelers” and border guards perform a game of “cat and mouse.” We then shift the focus to the subnational level; in particular, we consider the urban scale and how urban space attracts undocumented migrants and enables the emergence of new political subjectivities. Cities, we argue in this chapter, can offer a space for undocumented migrants to mobilize, build solidarity, and claim rights and belonging. In chapter 4, we consider the impact of immigration enforcement on undocumented migrants, focusing in particular on how they experience detention and the looming prospect of deportation and enforced destitution.

Chapter 5 shows how various contexts at departure as well as in the country of residence structure social mobility for undocumented migrants and how these migrants forge lives for themselves, despite their precarious existence.

In chapter 6, we explore the family experience of migration and the toll that separation of family members from one another takes on all their lives, especially on the well-being and future prospects of the youngest members of the family, including their emotional well-being and the opportunities for education and employment. In chapter 7, we conclude by considering approaches to contesting the concept and perception of “illegality” and link the experiential dimension of undocumented migrants to structural factors that have come to produce “illegality.” We discuss examples of contestation and resistance by undocumented migrants, focusing in particular on the DREAMers in the United States, the Sans Papiers in France, and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.